germe&JAM

Successive critiques of functionalist urbanism and of the postmodern attempt, frozen in its own aporias, have struggled — despite the rise of the urban project as a recognised practice — to produce convincing urban fabrics. At the same time, franchised and deterritorialised cities tend to reduce territory to the logic of the commodity, the city to emptiness, and architecture to mere décor.

How can we move beyond the standardisation of an increasingly generic form of urban production ? Between urbs and civitas, the necessary and desired sanctuarisation of public space and landscape at the heart of urban projects is not sufficient without a renewed conception of private space, which constitutes the ​“text” of a city — its complexity and intensity. Might the answer lie within the architectural discipline itself, and in the imaginaries it fosters for exploring ​“ordinary” urban fabrics, embedded in a process that is at once sedimented and sustainable, and capable of endowing the much-needed renewal of the city with a specific depth and tone ?